Joaquin Balaguer

Joaquin Videla Balaguer y Ricardo (1 September 1906-14 July 2002) was President of the Dominican Republic from 3 August 1960 to 16 January 1962 (succeeding Hector Trujillo and preceding Rafael Filiberto Bonnelly), from 1 July 1966 to 16 August 1978 (succeeding Hector Garcia-Godoy and preceding Antonio Guzman Fernandez), and from 16 August 1986 to 16 August 1996 (succeeding Salvador Jorge Blanco and preceding Leonel Fernandez). Balaguer was a conservative, and he was a member of the Dominican Party and the Social Christian Reformist Party throughout his career.

Biography
Joaquin Balaguer was born in Bisono, Dominican Republic on 1 September 1906. He graduated from the University of Santo Domingo and became a scholar and civil servant, and Balaguer became a protege of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo as a member of his Dominican Party. Balaguer served as Foreign Minister in 1954 and Vice-President from 1957 to 1960, and he was President from 1960 to 1962, following Trujillo's assassination. Balaguer went into self-imposed exile in the United States, and he founded the moderate Social Christian Reformist Party while he was in exile. He was elected President following his return after the 1965 Dominican Civil War, and his government proved an extension of Trujillo's regime. By 1974, the parties of the left had become completely disorganized, and he had 4,000 opponents murdered by government forces. Balaguer lost the 1978 elections, whose result he was forced to accept by US president Jimmy Carter. Despite his age and blindness, he was enabled to return to the presidency in 1986 by the divisions within the other parties, and his subsequent policies of generous public spending and economic stringency failed to revive the economy. In 1994, he was confirmed in the office for the seventh and last time, and he left office in 1996. Balaguer died in Santo Domingo in 2002 at the age of 95.